Safety Calculus

No, she insists, I never feel unsafe in the Bronx.  It’s on the Upper East Side walking alone, late at night, surrounded by drunk and entitled white men that she feels any unease.  She is aware of the coldness between 5th and Lex where no one but the occasional doorman would turn if she called out in need.  Any others would pull out cell phones and hurry away, dialing friends not help.  Her messenger bag of papers to grade and her professional hours, even when she works late, have given her bravery of untold proportions. 

Overall, she is fearless, almost irrationally so.  After dark, she calculates whether or not she can walk through Central Park by weighing the time and temperature and the number of hours since the sun has set.  She pauses only briefly before crossing busy intersections against the light.  A common set of computations assume that as a math teacher she won’t be rundown by an oncoming police car even if it speeds through the long intersection at 161st Street because, aside from it inevitably making headline news, she trusts in a higher divine power for her safety.  Yet one day in June, as she takes this risk she pauses longer.  It dawns on her that she can assess her risks and surroundings almost flawlessly in this bustling American city that daunts so many tourists, but it is only one environment and soon it will not be her home.

Soon she will be landlocked, at 8,000 feet, in a country where her gender and color will make her stand out sharply in contrast to those around her.  Though problems with racial issues seem muted there and gun violence is much less of a problem, she represents a country of wealth and power.  Would an entire army invade on her behalf or would she be abandoned by her nation?  Without sidewalks will her perambulatory habits make her a target or a heroine?  Will she take fewer risks or just develop a new safety calculus and continue to march fearlessly onwards?

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for future reference

This afternoon, I went shoe shopping with another member of the trifecta. I swore I would only buy a single pair, but wound up leaving with two (without a shopping bag and recycling the boxes). Both pairs will slide comfortably into my wardrobe. The brick red pair replaces my battered Italian bowling shoes that I got in Taiwan and the fabulous red flats that Meg took with her to Boston. The black pair replaces two pair of super-cheap, super-high heels I got when I first moved to the city. There were other pairs that I tried on and loved but didn’t feel ready for. They reflected a future version of myself who is slightly more professional and sophisticated, makes a little more money, and is in a serious relationship. They were not shoes for today.

While riding a crowded N train with another friend a few hours later, we watched the door close on a couple who was left stranded on the platform while their young daughter and another child in a stroller were trapped inside. The two of us feared for our future children, lest they suffer a similar fate in our efforts to be speedy and efficient. Though we were able to come up with all sorts of horrible outcomes to not heeding the subway’s warnings to fold strollers and carry small children, the couple, obviously from out of town, was travelling with another family. The extra parents and their children comforted the crying girl and got off at the next stop to wait for the remainder of their group.

I have also noted, for future reference, that I prefer the pandan ice cream to the naga at Vosges, but both are phenomenal. It easily outranks E&B, B&J, and HD, which sit comfortably in my top ten ice cream companies list. Still, a haute chocolate boutique may not be of the same competitive breed to offset the rankings.

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temporal benchmarks

Each time I sign a new credit card, I wonder what my life will be like when it expires. Will my last name be the same? Will my address be the same? Will I be able to use a credit card where I’m living? Will my credit limit have quadrupled? Christmases are routine and I’ve been trying to phase out birthday smashes, so other tracking devices for the passing time serve as better points of reflection and projection.

Today I arrive at my 100th blog post here. It means that I’ve written everyday for 107 days (counting the journal I kept in Paris and jottings one night when I was out at lake). I kept a journal all the way through high school, but it was nothing like this. This has been a new creative push, a chance to silently fill my life with words of my own. Though my life seems relatively static — same great friends, bad roommate, and intense job — Life has changed dramatically for many of my friends. One qualified for the Boston marathon, another left graduate school behind her, and six of them have read Anna Karenina. I’ve been to one wedding, one foreign country, and one great play. The goal for the summer is to begin writing more off this page in addition to continuing here. Hopefully, writing during the day when I’m more cogent will be an improvement over my 10 pm thoughts.

Today marks another landmark: the four year anniversary of my graduation from The Ohio State University. I was still an Ohio girl then, still drank alcohol, still didn’t know that I had a Mrs. Hyde side when provoked. Since then I have learned to teach and taught students that there is a world beyond the Bronx, that white people aren’t all racists bastards, and that math is only as scary as you allow it to be. I have adjusted to living five stories off the ground without carpet, wall-mounted light switches, or a home phone. The hardest lesson has been finding ways to measure my progress without grades or outside affirmations. Defining myself, my growth, and my personal standards has been so empowering. Not only can I think in much more sophisticated ways, I know that I have a cross referenced calendar and map that stores my personal memories that sits across from a massive web of knowledge that spins with the formation of new projects before it generates an output project.

Using my calendar storage sorting mentality, I can tell you that on a Wednesday night in June like this from the ages of 10 to 16, I would have been leaving a swim meet right about now. And if it had been this cold, it would have been cancelled at 4. If it was warmer, I would have my events written in permanent marker on my had, a swim cap on my head, and a great aversion to back stroke outside of the individual medley.

On this night, I am comfortable with my past and ready for my future.

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low impact girl: a six-day experiment

There’s a guy known as “No Impact Man”. You can google him to find out about his attempts to live without carbon emitting vehicles of any kind, eat food grown within a 250 mile radius of the city, use minimal electricity, use no paper and raise a daughter with his wife in some fancy building on Fifth Avenue for one full year. I am not working on a book deal, I have narrower financial resources at my disposal, and I lack the desire to take on a year-long ordeal like his. Instead, I’ve decided to try being Low Impact Girl for the next six days, beginning at 11 pm on Sunday, June 3rd.

Some parts of my life will remain the same since I’m already kinda green, but I’ll be adhering to my general practices more strictly. I will recycle all of the paper, glass, and 1 or 2 plastic I use, but will try to start by using less. I already carry unused napkins and empty glass bottles around in my messenger bag until I can recycle them, but this week I’m going to be hyper-conscious about what I’m throwing away at work. I normally do all of my grocery shopping with canvas bags, but this week I am not allowed to use any new plastic bags. This includes packaging for my lunch and other zip-lock bag applications as well as shopping ventures.

Then there are my new regulations. I will not be using public transportation this week. I will have to bike, walk, or inline skate everywhere no matter what the weather has in store. I can’t use a fan or A/C in my room unless it’s above 80 at night or above 90 during the day. My cell phone will be on only from 4 pm to 10 pm (or if I crash my bike) and I’ll only get to turn my computer on for an hour a day, so blogging will be reduced. Outside of this, all the electrical things except my refrigerator and alarm clock will be unplugged since even plugging appliances in saps electricity. I’m also not buying any “stuff” besides food. I’m going vegetarian for the week and drinking only water. I’ll make efforts to buy organic and items with reduced packaging, but I’ll still be using the stuff I bought last week even if it isn’t organic or has extra packaging.

With any “extra” time that I acquire as a result of being Low-Impact, I’m planning to read The Big Green Apple — Ben Jervey’s book on how to live have an eco-friendly life in the city. I’ve also got a New York Times magazine from April on the Greening of Geopolitics. Since I’m not going off of carbon-based fuel dependency completely, I’m letting myself watch movies and keep overhead lights on if I’m with other people. The experiment is based on the question: how much can I cut out and live my life as normally as possible without many of the amenities that most Americans take for granted.

Consider how you can lower your impact for this week by asking “One less?” Whether you use one less square of toilet paper, get one less bag at the grocery store, use one less gallon of gasoline by walking some place nearby or planning to run errands more efficiently, or watch TV for one less hour. If you want “one more” consider buying one more product grown locally, replacing one more light bulb in your home with a more efficient one, or recycling one more piece of paper that you’d normally just toss in the trash.

Greenhouse gases aside, as sophisticated human beings, we should be able to live full and amazing lives without creating massive landfills and living with a heavy dependency on non-renewable resources even if we seem to have an endless supply. This is the time to figure out how to make it happen.

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population density

I know what 104,000 people look like, I’ve been in Ohio Stadium when we’ve played Michigan. I know what 104 people look like from the day I addressed my fellow high school graduates. Even with a strong mathematical understanding of order of magnitude and the dramatic increases made when you multiply something by 10 or 1000, I have difficulty grasping what population means on a human scale — to calculate the number of us astride the globe and valuing each life. The planet is geographically capable of holding the 6.6 billion of us attempting to live here, even if it doesn’t seem to house sufficient resources for all.

Do ratios help? Does figuring that 1 in 20 global villagers live here in the US make us understand that each American should be helping the other 19 who could live in tents or on less than $1 a day or be refugees or illiterate or living without religious freedom? Does realizing that 1 in 38 Americans lives in one of the five boroughs of New York make me more pretentious or humble? Does the fact that there are the same number of people living on the island of Manhattan as there are Iraqis who have fled the country since the invasion four years ago make me sufficiently appreciative of my freedoms?

The relatively large number of cars passing me as I walked through Brooklyn at 10 pm as well as the hundreds of fellow subway riders and dozens of fellow bus riders on my subsequent trip remind me that I am one of many. Noticing that people are paid to count visitors in each gallery at the Metropolitan Musuem of art, that police work in groups of 4 to 8 at a time, and half the buildings I walk past have a doorman or some sort of security personnel makes me calculate the sheer enormity of humanity that treads in my footsteps. I make assumptions — that all of them are also desirous of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Just having a sense while watching movies that one death is tragedy enough to quantify as excessive violence. I do not stop hoping that I can make a positive impact on the existence of as much of the 6.6 billion as possible. It’s only a question of how and when. My heart’s there and my mind is wrapping itself around the size of the challenge by a power of 10 at a time.

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from scratch

At the end of every other month, I do a bi-monthly award ceremony in my classroom for students with perfect attendance (which includes being on time, not just coming), perfect uniform wearing, and perfect homework. Each student receives a certificate printed on ordinary paper and a cupcake. In some ways this is corny, but a cupcake that was baked the night before and hasn’t sat in a plastic package full of preservatives is a treasure in the neighborhood where I teach. Taking the time to buy the box of Betty Crocker cake mix; add the egg, water, and oil; pour the batter into baking tins; spread the store bought icing across them; and bring them to school magically makes them luxury items. When I brought them in Wedenesday for the award winners of March and April, my students thanked me for “baking from scratch.”

To me, “baking from scratch” requires many more ingredients, much more time, and a lack of pre-mixed box or pre-whipped icing. It’s what I did over three days to make sugar cookies for today’s garden party. It’s how people baked for decades… and centuries. Then I realized that it isn’t how things have happened for centuries. There’s a limited amount of history that contains grocery stores, plastic canisters of cream of tartar, refrigerated eggs, and kitchen-aide upright mixers. The process for making cane into sugar and wheat into flour and vanilla flavoring from a bean has evolved over the millenia, but one can’t travel very far back in time and still find birthday cakes and Christmas cookies. Moreover, it’s not possible to find the same ingredients just by travelling around the world. My well-stocked grocery-store shelves are not a reflection on the planet at large. One can’t bake from scratch when there is no scratch. In the conditions of refugee camps or deserted islands, in places where natural resources and the discarded resources of others are not available, even the creation of primitive living structures and simple edibles is a great challenge.

After eating unhealthy quanities of baked-from-scratch sugar cookies, butter cookies, and lemon loves, I’m contemplating what I can do to help the rest of the world have access to more “scratch”. I’ve received a very kind letter from Teachers for Africa explaining that I have not been admitted to their program, so I am pondering other ways to bring my cupcakes and other talents to others.

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when i grow up

I often slip into conversations the possibility that I will one day become a US President or a spy. If I was to seriously consider either of these two careers, it would make sense to talk much more about the former and much less about the latter. I realized today that I often consider these to be careers that exist only in the movies since I don’t read books about either or know anyone who actually does one of these jobs.

In any case, today, I got to feel like a spy. I was meeting a friend who was running late, didn’t have my address, and had a malfunctioning cell phone. When I missed a call from a 212 number (New York’s area code that has essentially been “used up”) while washing dishes, I considered calling it back. Instead I walked to the intersection where the call had been placed, according to the voice message, and checked the pay phone. The number on my phone matched the number on the phone in the booth. I felt brilliant, even if it’s a rather obvious connection.

The process didn’t help me find my friend, but I got to direct two girls to H&H bagels — further affirming my desire to be a tour guide or even a well-paid walking encyclopedia of New York history and geography.

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warning: math girl

In college, Yoshie and I decided to start The Yoshie/Ali Boyfriend School to train men who wanted to date our girl friends. This began with our dissatisfaction about one particular boyfriend of one very nice chemistry student. She eventually married a much nicer boy without any contributions from either of us. However, our hypothetical school lives on, and we write the “textbook” in fits and starts as boys do dumb things in the process of dating girls. Now that Yoshie is married, I feel like we have a stronger stamp on the organization.

There is also a supplemental text to the boyfriend guide — How To Not Scare Boys by Ali and for Ali. Rule 1 is don’t be a super [scary] geek.

I break this rule a lot! On Saturday I broke this rule repeatedly. I was asked whether aesthetically pleasing diamond was likely to be formed by two iscoeles triangles or by two equilateral triangles. I chose the former, but then proved it my measuring the dimmensions of a diamond shaped pane of glass on the door with my napking and observing that the width was 1.5 centimeters longer than the diagonal side. I was then asked the quadratic formula and had no problem reciting it. At this point the floodgate had opened and I couldn’t turn the geek off for hours. Sometimes I need to keep my mouth shut.

I broke Rule 1 two years ago as well. I was walking through The Gates in Central Park and walked past a bale of straw. The boy I was trying not to geekify, said “Hay!” and I didn’t get the joke. When he had to explain that he was making a pun, I tried explain that hay could be fed to animals and that what we were passing was referred to as straw since it had insulating properties but was not edible. Then I stopped, slapped my hand over my mouth, smiled sweetly, and promised not to factify.

Rule 1 does not prevent lots of geeky moments once I get to know someone, and it’s predictable that I will errupt into an analyitic nerd at any time. Today I was phoned from Ohio to examine the distinction between imaginary and real numbers. On the subway, I analyzed why drinking a serving of Gatorade was 50 calories, but 2.5 servings had 5 extra calories. Both times I felt safe, the girls with the questions aren’t going to run away.

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in defense of grey

Grey’s Anatomy is my guilty pleasure. Those who know me well, know the many reasons that it makes no sense for me to watch the show but I do. This fall, I tried to give it up for awhile, but it didn’t last.

In many ways, I found the potential death of it’s lead character Meredith over three episodes to be a bit much. While it was going on, I thought it would be a brilliant twist of tv-land fate to actually let her die. Then at the end, I actually had to think carefully about two points that the mini-mini-series raised, and how they reflected things I need to be concious of.

First, when the characters described how Derrick was rare because he believed in true love, I intially thought that was strange. However, listening to other peoples’ comments about dating, I think it’s important to recognize that even though most of us will not have arranged marriages, being committed to finding someone you really and truely love is not always the norm. Someone you find sexually attractive and/or very combatible with seems to be a more common goal.

Second, the characters told Meredith that for a doctor, she did not have a great respect for life. She was always trying to save others lives, but she didn’t fight very hard to save her own. Today I sent a student out of my classroom for verbally abusing a very sweet student. I was determined to keep the student out because I didn’t want the second student to feel threatened. I’ve made huge strides in the past four years in peaceful, non-anger-provoking discipline, but today, I was not above trying to keep the door closed as the student beat and spit on the other side. In the end, the cruel and spiteful student will likely get a suspension, and the other child remained unharmed. Sitting here now though, looking down at my hand, that got scratched up and bled during the incident, I recognize how I too need to be aware that saving lives includes saving my own. I cannot, while sick, injured, and exhausted save every child that I encounter. If I send myself abroad on my next venture, I must begin by evaluting my safety needs since only by living can I really save the lives of others.

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worth fighting for

“No you can’t touch the dinosaur bones!” I insisted.

“But we live in a free country.” Makil protested.

“Living in a ‘free country’ means that we have freedom of religion and speech and the power to vote to change things. Being free does not mean that you can touch the dinosaur bones,” I explained. “If everyone touched them, they would disintegrate or people would pull on them and the structures would fall apart. You have the freedom to go to a public school that takes you to a museum where you have the freedom to learn about dinosaurs and see an amazing collection of fossils, you should appreciate that instead of pouting because you can’t touch them.”

My argument all made complete sense to me, but Malik didn’t care. The Natural History Museum has obviously encountered many Maliks because they have one big fossilized bone that people can touch.

American mass mentality/propoganda is heavily geared towards fighting for freedom, but looking at photos from the anti-Bush protests in Brazil, I began thinking about all the countries that probably want to be free of American influence. To free themselves of a past that includes our intervention in their political, financial, and cultural affairs. Meanwhile the people of South America are free to make Bush look like Hitler, to denounce America’s foreign policy, and to resanctify holy Mayan ruins after Bush leaves.

Over the summer I considered joining the Coast Guard and went so far as to take a military physical. I spent the morning in a room full of 17-20 year old boys, some of whom had just spent their first night away from home. They were eager to go and fight for America and her causes. They did not have moral reservations about the war in Iraq, were eager to handle a gun or a helicopter. In contrast to the views of the vast majority of my friends, this was startling. I had forgotten/not realized that a significant portion of this nations’ people saw our actions in the Middle East as appropriate, or even vital. I was upset that night by the comments of the girls sitting behind me at the movie theatre that night when the ad for the marines came on, but I already knew deep down that the armed forces were not for me.

There is much that I believe in, but I’m trying to decide what I consider worth fighting for and then how to fight for it. I’m not going to fight to touch the dinosaurs, to expel Bush’s influence from the Brazil, or for the oil of an Arab land. But right now I’m not fighting to end the Iraq war or the genocides of Africa, to educate the international masses, or to treat legal and illegal immigrants as full fledged human beings with all their inalienable rights. And those are the things I believe are worth fighting for. In some ways I’ve begun to fight for peace by responding with strong passivism when Tommy tries to barge through my classroom door cursing and threatening me instead of building the altercation. I have made a long internal list about reasons to scale down our presence in Iraq. But now is the time to pick my battles and win the war to end war and more.

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